Mobile Memory; Or What Visitors Saw at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Abstract

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) serves as a memorial to the Holocaust and its victims, and as an instrument of history. These two aims were initially being proposed to occupy distinct spaces; they were eventually joined in a single building, forcing the tensions between history and memory into the space of the museum and, as a result, into the visitors’ experience. That tension continues today, by means of what I'll describe in this essay as mobility, a movement of displacement that manifests itself both in physical terms – in the movement of museum visitors through the space of the USHMM's Permanent Exhibition (PE), which is felt as disordered and dislocating – and in epistemological terms – in visitors’ attempts to contain their experiences in the PE in strictly historical or memorial terms. This kind of movement is very much the reverse of what the US Holocaust Memorial Council (USHMC) and later the museum's designers had intended to provoke. Through an analysis of visitor surveys and comments left by visitors of the Permanent Exhibit, this essay shows the extent to which visitors’ sense of events, and of their experience in the USHMM, was mobile, and that this kind of mobility is not only inevitable in the creation of and experience in historical museums like the USHMM but in fact should be expected, though it comes with certain (historical and memorial) risks.